Lib at Large: John Korty, the father of Marin movies, looks back

FOR AN ACADEMY Award-winning director who inspired George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola to join him in creating "Hollywood North" in the Bay Area, John Korty deserves to be a lot better known than he is.

But fame has never been high on his list. He doesn't have a wall in his West Marin office with photos of himself with all the movie stars he's worked with. Unlike some other successful directors, he doesn't display his awards in a special case for everyone to see. He'd rather use them as bookends.

As he says, "I've always been too self-conscious for that stuff."

Maybe that's why, in his 50-year career, he's never had a major retrospective. That changes this month, when the Rafael Film Center celebrates his extraordinary body of work starting Nov. 10 with the premiere of the just-completed "John Allair Digs In!," a musical portrait of Marin's original rock 'n' roller.

"He's got this vision, and he comes up with these great films," Allair says. "But he's so quiet and reserved you'd never know."

The clarity of his vision was evident for a national audience in 1974 when he directed the Emmy-winning "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman," an unforgettable television drama starring Cicely Tyson as a slave who lives long enough to become part of the Civil Rights Movement. New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael called it "perhaps the finest film made for American television."

Four years later, he won an Oscar for "Who Are the DeBolts? (And Where Did They Get 19 Kids?)," an empathetic documentary about a couple and their adopted children, many of them disabled war orphans.

That kind of socially conscious work inspired Leonard Maltin to describe Korty as "a principled filmmaker who has worked both outside and within the mainstream, attempting to find projects that support his humanistic beliefs."

Korty turned 75 over the summer, so the time feels right to take a look back at what he's done and where he's been, even though he's still forging ahead, embracing the possibilities of digital video and looking to make a revolutionary "ultimate film," a dream since his undergraduate days at Antioch College in Ohio.

"Most movies are pictures of people talking," the Indiana native says. "Film can be so much more than that. Now that I'm this age, and I've got all this experience under my belt, it's time to do something that breaks some new ground."

Korty is saying this one Saturday morning over breakfast at the Station House Cafe in Point Reyes Station, just down the street from his modest office and not far from the home he and his wife bought in 1993. Despite his snowy hair and neatly trimmed white beard, he looks much younger than he is, a genetic blessing he says he inherited from his parents.

He had just finished the Allair documentary the day before, so he treats himself to a slice of pumpkin pie piled with whipped cream.

"I don't do this very often," he insists, smiling contentedly. "But I'm celebrating."

The Stinson studio

He may be modest and unassuming, but Korty is the undisputed father of filmmaking in Northern California. Rebelling against the conventional wisdom that you have to be in Hollywood to make it in movies, he arrived in Marin in 1963, setting up his first studio in a drafty old barn in Stinson Beach.

"I rented it for $105 a month," he remembers. "There were cracks in the concrete floor and holes in the walls. We'd work with our overcoats on in the winter. That's the place that (Francis) Coppola and (George) Lucas saw on the Fourth of July 1968. They showed up in two station wagons, and when Francis walked in, his mouth dropped open. He said, 'My God, you've done exactly what we want to do — get out of Hollywood and set up a studio. If you can do it, we can do it.' They came back the very next week, and we started looking for a place where the three of us could have our work spaces together."

In Stinson, Korty made three successful independent films in four years — his feature debut, the critically acclaimed "The Crazy Quilt," in 1966 followed by "Funnyman," shot in San Francisco and Bolinas, and "Riverrun," about a conscientious objector.

"After 'The Crazy Quilt' got some incredibly good reviews, all the big agents came up from L.A. and wanted to talk to me," he recalls. "I had already started to raise money for my second feature, and they were sending me some really bad scripts. I knew I could go down there and make some money, but I wouldn't be happy, and I was sort of afraid of who I would become. I'd been in L.A. enough to know that your life is nothing but movies. And, of course, the whole emphasis is on commerciality and success in that world. So I decided not to sign up."

Home in Mill Valley

After a couple of years in Coppola's original American Zoetrope in San Francisco, Korty returned to Marin, establishing a studio in a three-story house in Mill Valley, his home base for 20 years. He lived nearby, where his two sons, Jonathan, now a well-known Marin musician, and David, a noted artist, grew up. A third son, Gabriel, 22, is a budding actor and photographer.

While he's always stayed true to himself, Korty has not been immune to the lure of Hollywood. While he was directing the studio picture "Oliver's Story," the sequel to the 1970 tear-jerker "Love Story," he found out that he'd won the Academy Award for the "DeBolts" documentary. It wasn't as glamorous as it might sound.

"When you've won an Oscar, people come up to you and say, 'It must have been great. How did it feel walking up on the stage?'" he says. "But when I won the Oscar, I was in a New York hotel room, folding my laundry. I was watching the Academy Awards show on TV. I was in the middle of filming 'Oliver's Story,' and we were spending $60,000 a day, so I couldn't leave just because I was nominated for an Oscar. Ten seconds after it was announced that I'd won, my phone started ringing. All my friends called."

At first, Korty was allowed to cast "Oliver's Story" himself. After he'd picked a couple of actors for the lead roles, he sent their names to the honchos at Paramount Pictures.

Korty sighs and continues: "The two names they turned down were Meryl Streep and William Hurt. It would have been a totally different movie with them. But it was 1978, and they'd never heard of them. Within a year, Meryl Streep was on the cover of Time magazine. But that's the Hollywood approach."

You can see by the variety of films in Korty's retrospective that he has resisted the Hollywood approach, exploring many different genres as a director, writer and producer.

"Generally, in Hollywood, if you have a big success, the safest thing to do is the same thing again and again," he says. "People always wanted me to do that. After 'Miss Jane Pittman,' I was offered all the films about old ladies, all the films about black people, all the films that took place in the South. But I like variety. I like to go from comedy to serious films to animation. To me, my work is a kind of vacation, and I don't like to go to the same place over and over again."